The divided selves of Sofia and Victoria

The divided selves of Sofia Zetterlund and Victoria Bergman are depicted not as neatly separate identities but as interdependent presences within a fractured sense of self. Their connection is defined by memory that returns in fragments, a private interior world that Victoria occupies, and Sofia’s effort to keep that darkness from Jeanette Kihlberg. The novel gives this division both psychological and architectural form: Victoria’s suffering becomes a room built within her, while the two selves remain bound together and reliant on one another.

Identity and Inner Structure

The division is conveyed through shifts in presence rather than through a simple opposition between two independent people. Victoria can be experienced as moving through an intimate interior space, yet she is described as simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. That paradox makes her neither wholly absent nor straightforwardly available to Sofia. The inner world that Sofia has entered contains things Victoria has tried throughout her life to forget; when Victoria walks there, the past is no longer only something Sofia observes from a distance. It has become an active presence within the space she inhabits.

The narrative also gives this inner division a story-like architecture. It describes Victoria as a three-year-old girl whose father builds a room inside her, a place associated with pain and suffering. Over time, the room acquires walls of sorrow, a floor formed from a desire for revenge, and a roof of hate. Its parts make emotional history into a structure: suffering encloses Victoria, while the wish for revenge and accumulated hate become elements of the enclosure itself. The account says the room becomes so sealed that she cannot get out, and that she remains inside it. This image presents division not as a voluntary disguise that can simply be removed, but as a survival structure that has become confinement.

Memory and the Return of the Past

Sofia’s memory has large gaps, figured as black holes she passes in dreams and on long walks. These gaps are not static. They can grow when a smell or another person’s particular look touches something unrecognized; images can be reconstructed when she hears wooden shoes on gravel or sees someone from behind in the street. The concrete triggers matter because they show how the past returns indirectly, through ordinary perception, rather than as a complete and deliberately summoned recollection. On such occasions, the sense of self is swept by a force Sofia cannot readily control.

A decisive change occurs when another part of her memory opens. What had been indistinct still images begins to take the form of film fragments. The shift from stillness to movement suggests increased access to remembered experience, but not an orderly recovery: fragments remain fragments, and their emergence is sudden. The novel therefore links identity to the form memory takes. When the past is blurred or still, it can remain at a distance; when it begins to move, the boundary between recollection and present experience becomes harder to maintain. This is a return, not evidence that the memory gaps have been resolved.

Dependence, Concealment, and Release

Sofia’s relationship to Victoria involves both knowledge and fear. Sofia has entered Victoria’s internal world and sometimes encountered material Victoria has spent her life trying to forget. Yet Sofia’s contact with that history does not mean she can expose it freely. When she thinks about meeting Jeanette, she tries to keep her darkness back and prevent Jeanette from encountering Victoria. The division thus has an interpersonal consequence: what Sofia conceals from Jeanette is not only a set of memories but the presence of the other self as Sofia understands it.

Concealment is difficult because Sofia and Victoria are described as shackled together and dependent on one another. The image insists on a bond that is restrictive without being merely antagonistic. Victoria waits for the moment when Sofia has to let her out in order to keep herself from sinking. Her emergence is therefore connected to Sofia’s limits: suppression cannot continue indefinitely without consequence. The passage frames release as a pressure within their shared existence, not as a settled decision by one self to discard the other. Their dependence makes every attempt at separation precarious, while their confinement together makes concealment equally unstable.

Attempts at Change and the Meaning of Integration

Sofia asks what she was once able to see but can no longer see, then describes attempts to develop her personality into an entirely new being—not an alternative or an addition, but something wholly new. The stated aim is unconditional acceptance. This desire marks a difference between adding another role to an already divided self and imagining a self that might no longer be organized by the same divisions. It also places acceptance against the room’s architecture: the room has been built through sorrow, revenge, and hate, while the search for a new being points toward a different relation to the self.

The evidence presents that search as an effort, not as a completed transformation. The desire for unconditional acceptance does not establish that Victoria has escaped the inner room, that Sofia has recovered all the missing memories, or that their identities have become fully integrated. Instead, the passages hold together several states that resist an easy resolution: Victoria is present within Sofia’s private world but difficult to locate; memories are opening but remain fragmentary; Sofia wants change while Victoria’s history continues to shape their shared life. The divided selves are significant because these tensions make identity a continuing negotiation among remembered experience, concealment, dependence, and the possibility of accepting what has been kept inside.